The most important invention of man was the wheel, or therefore they made me believe in school. In the years after graduation, the wheel played a significant role in my life, because it is inevitable in everyone’s life.
Since the first wheel appeared in Mesopotamia about 5,500 years ago, its impact on the lives of those who used it was dramatic. Its first use would most likely be close to its basic needs today; helping to move something or someone at some distance, with other uses, including, for example, grinding wheat to make flour. Later, about 4,000 years ago, stones (stone circles) of Britain were built and used to mark days of the year, early calendars, and usually studied astronomy, usually with portals denoting solstices and stones arranged in a circle to mark important times of the year. In what then became the agricultural world, the seeds could be stitched with some predictability, and the yield of the crop increased due to the optimal use of the growing season.
During most of the 20th century, and especially in the second half, the wheel featured prominently in events that changed the lives of everyone. In the field of science and technology, in mechanical engineering, the wheel was and still plays an important role in the production of everything from aircraft to knitting needles.
Even flat surfaces, gear racks and gear teeth are made using a wheel rotating like a cutter, milling mills and molds into metal, grinding precision components with dimensions up to a tenth of a thousand centimeters. Smooth profiled curves of cars and airplanes, as well as round plastic surfaces of children's toys, are made using wheel spin at certain points in the production process.
Presses and blacksmith forges mark huge, red hot billets of steel and shiny sheets of aluminum and stainless steel, injection molding machines, hot, ductile plastic or alloy, into customary household containers, tubes, bottles and packaging, all using the rule Pi and its circular derivative works to complete the pressing into the form of submissive and omnipresent substances: iron, steel, plastic and glass. During the formation of our landscape, in river dams, culvert flows and marsh drains, and in the construction of bridges, overpasses, highways and docks, the wheel was and remains the main engine.
Circularity is so common today that it has become part of our thinking. We are talking about circular arguments, vicious circles, etc. Perhaps not always consciously understanding how geometric shape affects our lives, but a shape close to a circle would be obvious only before the invention of the wheel because of the natural world: the view of the moon and sun in Heaven above, and in the shapes of flowers and in cross sections of felled trees. Similarly, in related areas of history and culture, the wheel, the round shape, occupies a prominent place,
The myths around Camelot and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have become metaphors of justice and law; Forums and meetings are ideally held around roundtables. Theaters on tour dominate the cultural life of many British cities. There is something democratic and empowered in the circle, and its usefulness in the form of a wheel is invaluable; the round table has no corners, and everyone sitting on it has no more advantages because of its position on its periphery than anyone else. Both concept and form, the circle is connected with revolution, the overthrow, often violently, of social order. In terms of Thomas Kuhn; "Political revolutions are aimed at changing political institutions in ways that prohibit these institutions."
Essentially, in simpler terms, approaching the top of those that were previously subordinate, the principle of subjugating the circle and the wheel, and this suggests the principle of catastrophism, which claims that the conditions on Earth during the past were so different from the present ones that comparison is not possible. As for the scientific revolutions, the concept of catastrophism also seems to be more closely related to the development of the progress of science. In Kuhn's own words, a scientific revolution occurs “when the existing paradigm ceases to function insufficiently to study the aspect of nature to which the paradigm itself preceded earlier.”
Finally, in mathematical terms, the circle remains an incomprehensible mystery, with the relationship between circumference and diameter deviating from a strictly defined, absolute value, pi.Now, when half the world has moved away from major industries, such as mining, and even partly from production, to tertiary , the service sector, pride of place is given to the center of the technological revolution, the microchip. The wheel is still as useful as ever, but in a world where the movement of information is dominant, it has almost no space. For in terms of something fundamental moving along the so-called “super highway” and telecommunications, as a rule, practically does not affect the physical material.
The emergence of a microchip clearly marked the new ground in terms of what it was before. For Daniel Bell (“The emergence of a post-industrial society”) and other authors such as Alvin Toffler (“The Third Wave”, Future Shock & # 39;), the tertiary / post-industrial phase is not characterized by a person who overcomes nature (primary industry), but by a man overcoming the artificial world (secondary manufacturing industry), but not paying attention to the person himself, putting restrictions and checks on the nature of the person, # 39;, and use it in areas such as marketing. In this latest conflict, the # microchip may be just as important as the wheel for those who invented it and rarely used it. In the microchip there is something mysterious, as in a circular form, in particular, to the uninitiated.
The chip is a miracle of miniaturization, and the functions it can perform are stunning, but the time it takes to complete the operation is very surprising. With miniaturization, the furious pace of micro processing has come. Therefore, from the point of view of what was before, the spectral changes in speed and range made possible with the advent of the microprocessor are summarized or will be in retrospect, which is more closely related to the principle of “catastrophism”, and although this notification usually applies to the geological formation of the planet This is a useful concept in any explanations concerning the history of the wheel and the microprocessor.
Social and historical commentators, looking back at the events that surround these two technological processes, namely the wheel and the microchip, may well look at their history in this way. each event and issuing each one. With the help of the wheel, the concept of rotation would be well known, visible and logical, and after that the wheel would be freely accessible to those who need it, in the area in which it originated.
On the other hand, the introduction of the microchip concerned a relatively small number of specialists with technological expertise and access to certain resources that were not freely available, and the invention would not be visible. those who do not participate, and whether it was not freely available at the initial stage, are protected by patents and confidentiality. The massive, almost catastrophic change in the temporal speed of data processing, which was made possible by microprocessors, is most easily demonstrated by the following comparison,
At a time when England was the most productive, the era of Victoria, when the manufacturing industry was in its prime, and basically all said the words "Made in England"; with printing on it, cutting the material in the form of a gentleman's jacket accelerated sharply thanks to the introduction of powerful and precise presses, which were modified to cut pieces in fabric, not metal. Thousands of costumes could be cut daily, eliminating the burdensome task of cutting each one by hand. When the microprocessor has made its mark in the same process, jackets of different sizes can be cut in the same way and much earlier than one after the other than multiple cuttings of the pressure of the explosion of the age of Victoria.
In addition, the machine can be programmed to cut each length to different sizes, which would be necessary for a large reengineering operation in one day. Many jackets of different sizes can now be cut individually individually much faster than one embossing can be, for example, twenty homogeneous pieces of fabric. This comparison of the modus operandi can be simple, but it can be easily understood by those who are used only for thinking in terms of mechanical movement and limited speed. In the course of waging a modern war, from the horrors of the Great War in Europe, and more recently, to the ultra-high-tech flood of weapons flowing down the bottom, the wheel is still a force to be reckoned with.
Tanks and guns, tank transporters, personnel carriers, helicopters and airplanes rely on the predictability and certainty of the wheel. Shells and bullets fly more precisely and deadly towards their targets due to cutting in round barrels. However, now instead of an accelerating bullet or shell going in a straight line, we have a so-called “smart bomb”, which is aimed at its target by a computer, turning to the right and left as necessary. Cutting in a round barrel suddenly has a much smaller value.
For this is the nature of the world in which we live, and in which microchip dominates; one of which was once the productive sector of the economy became inherently extinct, and with it a large part of the working population found itself in a world that it does not understand, and does not feel that it can ever. The transition from a world where the wheel was the dominant form / icon for one in which a fixed piece of silica dominates was for many quick and nervous, and for those who can adapt, it welcomes and expands opportunities.
Wheels work on tracks, roads and lines, and probably contributed to perceptions that tend to be linear. On the other hand, the directions around which the microprocessor operates are numerous and make us challenge our ways of thinking, so now a more lateral, rather than linear, approach to solving problems is more usual and really vital,
Old means and methods give way to a new, sometimes confusing set of answers and possible solutions. The guns are still firing from circular trunks, and four-wheel tractors are still plowing the ground, but in managing and controlling people and how they spend their time, both in the workplace and outside the workplace, more traditional ways of thinking have given way to what I will call a multi-pass approach. to the management. Now, many other measurements can be triggered and used because of the speed and power of the microprocessor, and therefore people should try to "continue." or dies when others progress and succeed.
The development of information technology that has changed our whole life, of course, is the Internet. The world is a global village. and all are related to everyone else. This is not entirely true; despite the fact that most of the people who inhabit planet earth still do not have access to clean, running water, proper sanitation or electricity, let alone telephone communications with the Internet or a PC to communicate with the rest of the world on the Internet. Of those unfortunate people who crowded around the periphery of our largest cities, living in sprawling slums and ghettos, little is used for a microchip or even a wheel.
The armed forces, or, most often, women, are still the dominant force; without roads or any infrastructure, these poorest areas do not have sufficient reserves for the wheel, nor for the microprocessor, nor for it. The Earth is round, but some of those who live on its surface are positioned differently with respect to their wealth and possibilities. The true advantages of the wheel and the microchip have not yet reached all four corners of the Earth.
